Twisting and Turbulent Case for Formula One Chief

LONDON — As 11 Formula One teams prepared recently to head for Austin, Tex., where the penultimate round of this year’s 19-race championship will take place Sunday, it was not the domination of the German driver Sebastian Vettel, winner of 11 of this year’s races and a strong favorite in Austin, that spurred the most fevered talk among grand prix racing insiders.

Instead, it was the proceedings in Courtroom 26 of the High Court’s Chancery Division in London, set in an annex to the 150-year-old, crenelated complex known as the Royal Courts of Justice. The case there is one of four that Bernie Ecclestone, the 83-year-old billionaire who is the ringmaster of Formula One, faces in coming months. Two other civil cases, in Munich and New York, and a possible criminal trial in Germany are also on the horizon, all related to allegations of fraud by Ecclestone in the 2006 sale of Formula One’s commercial rights.

A verdict in the London case is expected next spring. If it goes against Ecclestone, it could force a quick end to the iron-fisted control he has built since entering the sport as a team owner in the 1970s. That has alarmed those in Formula One who credit him with turning the sport into the globe-spanning financial bonanza it has become in the last 25 years.

Others have been encouraged by the sweeping changes they believe would be possible in a post-Ecclestone era, including new rules for profit-sharing by the teams that would end the era of cloistered, billion-dollar agreements and secret payments into Swiss bank accounts that have been exposed in the London court. Those deals have effectively stripped Formula One over the past decade of control of its own affairs, handing the sport’s ownership — and billions in profits — to outside investors, and enabling Ecclestone to accumulate a personal fortune of at least $4 billion. They have also left all but 4 of the 11 teams that will compete at Austin — Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes-Benz and Red Bull — flirting with bankruptcy on a race-to-race basis.

One team, Lotus, has admitted that it has been unable to pay Kimi Raikkonen, a former world champion who is the team’s lead driver, any of the $15 million it owes him for the 17 races he has contested this year.

Ten days into the London case, Ecclestone, who cuts a distinctive figure with his 5-foot-3-inch frame and his over-the-ears mop of gray hair, has dominated the proceedings.

He has brushed off evidence showing his personal involvement in a secret $44 million payment to a German banker involved in the 2006 sale of a majority ownership in Formula One to a London-based venture capital firm, CVC Capital Partners, for $1.5 billion. The court case, Ecclestone told reporters Monday, was “good because a lot of facts come out of it,” facts that he implied were favorable to him.

The presiding judge, Sir Guy Newey, a former bankruptcy lawyer, will have to weigh a claim by the German media company suing Ecclestone and his associates that the payment to the banker, Gerhard Gribkowsky, was a bribe engineered by Ecclestone. Gribowsky is serving an 8½-year jail term for his role in the affair, imposed by a Munich court after he was found guilty of fraud and embezzlement earlier this year.

The company, Constantin Medien, a former part owner of Formula One, has contended that the payment, $17 million of it in the form of a personal check from Ecclestone, was part of a “corrupt agreement” intended to ensure that Gribkowsky, representing the banks that then controlled Formula One, would approve the sport’s sale to CVC. Constantin’s lawyers contend that the price agreed to in the deal, $1.5 billion, vastly undervalued Formula One, thus depriving the company of $170 million — the sum it claims to be its rightful dividend from the sale.

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Bernie Ecclestone with his wife, Fabiana Flosi. Accused of fraud, he has often seemed perplexed.CreditPeter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Ecclestone’s version is that the money paid to Gribkowsky was a response to his being “shaken down” with a threat to go to the British tax authorities with evidence that Ecclestone retained secret control of a family trust that was the depository for most of the $3.1 billion Ecclestone earned from a previous sale of the Formula One rights in 2000. If that claim were upheld by the British authorities, Ecclestone has said, it would have cost him $2 billion in taxes and condemned him to bankruptcy.

Even before the hearings, Ecclestone lent a farcical start to the proceedings when he treated camera crews waiting at the courthouse entrance to a performance worthy of Charlie Chaplin.

In a scene that quickly found its way onto YouTube, he emerged from his chauffeur-driven limousine and strode up to the courthouse’s street-side revolving door, then appeared to become confused, reaching the building’s foyer before the rotating door spun him full circle back onto the street.

Muttering about wanting to give the cameramen a second chance at recording his arrival, he made a second bid to enter the building, by a side door that turned out to be locked, adding a further touch of burlesque to the occasion.

The sequence raised questions that went to the heart of his behavior in court.

Was Ecclestone simply showing his age? Or was he engaging in a bit of wily theater to set himself up for the character he has adopted on the stand, as a man too befuddled, too overworked and too forgetful to recall in detail what he did in his Formula One dealings?

He has peppered his testimony with professions of bafflement as to what is being asked of him, requests for a repeat of questions he says he has not grasped, and complaints that the court is moving too quickly. Paging laboriously through thick folders of court documents and rubbing his eyes, he has said repeatedly that the rigors of the case are taxing his memory, his intellectual capacity and his hearing.

“I have a bit of difficulty to remember what happened last week,” he said at one point. “It could have been, I don’t remember,” at another. “I had no idea, I still don’t,” at still another.

Sometimes, it has been the legal language itself that Ecclestone has found puzzling. When confronted with the phrase “extraneous to requirement” in a document dealing with a possible rival bid for the Formula One rights by the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, Ecclestone responded, “I don’t know what that means.”

On several occasions, he professed to have no knowledge of documents bearing his signature. “I sign so many things, I’ve no idea what I’ve signed,” he said at one point. Shown a letter on the CVC deal bearing his signature, he invoked difficulty in reading anything he had written himself.

“Yes, that’s my writing,” he said, “because I can’t read it, so it must be mine.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B18 of the New York edition with the headline: Twisting and Turbulent Case for Formula One Chief. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe